Stoic Books
Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations
Dialogues on death, pain, grief, emotion, virtue, and the resources of philosophy.
What this text offers
Dialogues on death, pain, grief, emotion, virtue, and the resources of philosophy. Ask Stoics preserves this edition as a searchable public-domain source rather than presenting isolated quotations without context.
The library contains 180 passage records from this work, with locators and edition provenance.
How to study it
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Questions to bring to the text
Search this work for death, pain, grief, and virtue. For each result, ask what claim is being made, what distinction supports it, and what kind of conduct follows.
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From reading to practice
Write one sentence that preserves the author’s distinction in your own situation without turning the source into a slogan or an external promise.
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Keep the locator beside your note. On the next reading, revise the note if the wider argument corrects or complicates your first interpretation.
Edition and provenance
Translation: Charles Duke Yonge. Coverage: complete edition. Rights status: public domain in the launch territories.
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Primary-text evidence
These excerpts are shown with their exact work locators. Read them as evidence for study, not as detached slogans.
“At a time when I had entirely, or to a great degree, released myself from my labours as an advocate, and from my duties as a senator, I had recourse again, Brutus, principally by your advice, to those studies which never had been out of my mind, although neglected at times, and which after a long interval I resumed: and now since the principles and rules of all arts which relate to living well depend on the study of wisdom, which is called philosophy, I have thought it an employment worthy of me to illustrate them in the Latin tongue: not because philosophy could not be understood in the Greek language, or by the teaching of Greek masters; but it has always been my opinion, that our countrymen have, in some instances, made wiser discoveries than the…”
“Is poverty the subject? they tell you of many who have submitted to it with patience. Is it the contempt of honours? they acquaint you with some who never enjoyed any, and were the happier for it; and of those who have preferred a private retired life to public employment, mentioning their names with respect; they tell you of the verse of that most powerful king, who praises an old man, and pronounces him happy, because he was unknown to fame, and seemed likely to arrive at the hour of death in obscurity and without notice. Thus too they have examples for those who are deprived of their children; they who are under any great grief are comforted by instances of like affliction; and thus the endurance of every misfortune is rendered more easy by the…”
“But as we are to depart in the morning, let us remember these five days' discussions; though, indeed, I think I shall commit them to writing: for how can I better employ the leisure which I have, of whatever kind it is, and whatever it be owing to? and I will send these five books also to my friend Brutus, by whom I was not only incited to write on philosophy, but, I may say, provoked. And by so doing, it is not easy to say what service I may be of to others; at all events, in my own various and acute afflictions, which surround me on all sides, I cannot find any better comfort for myself. THE END”